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The legendary rap group De La Soul just released their first album since 2004, and the Anonymous Nobody... What makes the release stand out is not just the music, or the group's unusual recording methods (they recorded musicians jamming, and then "sampled" the results as if they were old albums). The record was funded by an extremely successful Kickstarter campaign.

In 2015, the group announced that they were going to raise money for a new record using the online crowdfunding platform. They set an initial goal of $110,000, but ended up raising a staggering $600,874.

On August 23, right before the album's official release, two-thirds of De La Soul, Kelvin "Posdnuos" Mercer and Dave Jolicoeur (third member Vincent "Maseo" Mason was absent) met up with a crowd of supporters and media at NYC's Sonos store to play the album for diehard fans, fellow artists (rappers Pharoahe Monch and Consequence were in attendance), and media.

Music marketing guru Brandon Hixon, who oversaw the campaign for the group, was also on hand. He explained that when the group originally came to him with the idea of crowdfunding a new album, he was nervous – especially since several high-profile hip-hop campaigns (a Geto Boys reunion album; a proposed joint project by Onyx and M.O.P.) had failed within the past few years.

"Kickstarter was weird to me, based on the fact that you could lose," Hixon explained. "There’s a huge downside to it if it doesn’t work. So I was afraid to put their careers on the line for this service."

The group insisted it was the right way to go, so Hixon and the musicians had to figure out how the platform worked. Ultimately, they decided to treat the Kickstarter campaign just like any other product the band would release.

"It’s just using traditional marketing, like you would set up any other product," Hixon said. "I looked at Kickstarter as the product, as [if it were an] album. So we set up the release date, we set up the pre-planning, we set up press, we set up everything like we would set up an album, but it was for the campaign."

Once the campaign was underway, the group found that they were getting support not only from fans of their music, but also from people who were invested in Kickstarter in general.

"There was a reaction from the Kickstarter community, who just are all about being behind or pushing a project that sounds like a great idea,"Jolicoeur said. "There was a big part of that community that came and supported us. They might not have been the biggest De La Soul fans, but they understood what we were trying to accomplish and got on board with us."

Photo of Mercer and Jolicoeur courtesy of Sonos.

Kickstarter as a company provided support as well. They invited the group to their offices several months into De La's internal strategizing.

"Once they realized how far along we were in the process and how smart we were being, and not just going out there and launching it based on their name, they started to actually offer a lot of advice," Hixon remembered. "They realized how far along we were in the process, and how smart we were being by really looking into data and how the platform could be utilized."

The crowdfunding effort succeeded due to smart planning, a diehard fanbase, and the connections the group built up over the years. The launch of the Kickstarter campaign was announced not only by De La Soul, but by many of their celebrity friends. Questlove, Common, DJ Premier and Canadian comedian Russell Peters were only a few of the prominent figures who lent their social media support to the effort.

Once De La Soul realized that they were going to raise multiples of their original goal, they had to figure out what they were going to do with the new resources. Mercer said that it enabled the group to "dream bigger" when planning the record. They could afford more guest artists – like Snoop Dogg, who appears on the album's first single "Pain." They also brought in additional musicians, including horn and string sections.

Conscious of how their budget was coming directly from fans, the group did not pay themselves anything during the process of making the album. In fact, they spent an additional $250,000-$300,000 beyond the money raised from crowdfunding, bringing the total cost of the project, according to Jolicouer, to "over a million dollars."

Now that the album is done, De La Soul and their team are hard at work fulfilling rewards to their Kickstarter backers. From a loft in Hoboken, they have a three-person team sending out 7,000 packages all over the world ["That's like Amazon s**t," Hixon jokes]. But even more important than that, the group now has a list of thousands of core supporters. The group was overwhelmed to discover that they had 11,169 people who donated an average of over $50 to make their artistic vision happen.

"One of our biggest learning experiences was to find that 11,000 people actually paid for something where they didn’t know what it was going to sound like, when it was going to come out, or if they’d enjoy it," Jolicouer said. "That was really cool. Just the trust factor was humbling to me."

I am the host of The Cipher, the critically acclaimed hip-hop podcast (theciphershow.com) which conducts in-depth interviews with the genre’s most interesting and…

I am the host of The Cipher, the critically acclaimed hip-hop podcast (theciphershow.com) which conducts in-depth interviews with the genre’s most interesting and important figures. I am also the former Editor in Chief of Rap Genius, and have written about music and culture for The Atlantic, Vibe, The Source, GQ, Esquire, the Sondheim Review, and more. I am a Berklee-trained musician who has toured and recorded with a lot of acts you’ve heard of, and many more you haven’t.